Tag: parenting

He sends his arms high and crashes them down against his thighs over and over. He hasn’t learned the pain of bruised legs or swollen fists, making his motions more fearless. He’d start to fly in a different life; if his biology took a slightly different evolutionary path. But he’s just a plain ol human being.

He’s taught himself how to sit up and is quickly learning how much more interactive the world becomes when you are vertical. His massive blue eyes, the glaring objects of affection for all passers by. They take in the world like two gallons of water emptied onto a thirsty sponge. Pupils dilate from the flashing lights of toddler toys. His mouth drops open when he’s particularly amazed at the daily monotony we’ve spent a lifetime dulling down and drowning out.

We’ve been here for an hour. Maybe more. Maybe less. I’ve found that he’s the only way I am truly present in a given moment. I can’t watch TV and I can’t fuck around aimlessly on my phone with casual obsession. He knows when I’m looking away. He knows when my mind has left the room. He sometimes prevents me from being able to go into the basement to put dirty laundry into the washer, or straighten up the dining room. He is not needy.

He wants to share his world with me. He forces me to be selfless–in the end for my own benefit. He doesn’t care about my poor eating choices this week, or that I skipped the gym today, or that I’m not challenged in my career. His greatest ambition is to fit his entire hand into his mouth, and catch Xuni’s attention by screaming at him because he doesn’t have defined degrees of excitement. He’s always at eleven or like a two.

He cares about eventually eating, eventually pooping, and eventually sleeping.

I saw this coming. When I married my wife in 2014, I tucked this into my vows: “I promise that of all the big ideas or big master plans I come up with, we will follow through on at least half of them.” My wife and I are ambitious people. We take a lot of pride in taking on a lot of life. It shows up in our travel plans, our work schedules, our dietary challenges, our hobbies, and our commitment to spending time with family and friends.

But, something’s changed recently. Free time is abbreviated and we orbit around a new gravitational pull. The change is our bright-eyed baby boy. He’s about halfway through his first trip around the sun, meanwhile his parents are trying to live between two worlds. The Before Child, or BC-era Rae and Ty are trying to keep up with the Child Era Rae and Ty, and it’s…well, it’s tough.

The boy is great. Raising him is, and has been, an incredible experience. Rae and I have so much joy and pride in parenting such a beautiful happy child. Some of the greatest moments of my day are watching him get excited when he sees his mother come home, watching him watch his hands move, or seeing the wonderment in his eyes when I move my hands through the air like a jellyfish drifting through the ocean. Our mistakes thus far haven’t had anything to do with him. They’ve had to do with us wanting to stay superhuman.

I like proving people wrong. No, it’s more than that. I need to prove people wrong. I love doing what you either think I shouldn’t or can’t do. For instance, in growing up with an alcoholic, drug-addicted father, I became strictly drug- and alcohol-free for the first quarter century of my life. I’d intentionally listen to music that others wouldn’t suspect from me, because I hated being stereotyped. “Wait, I’m the only person at my company from my college?” Fine, I’ll be ten times better at my job than kids who went to Yale and prestigious school X. I’ve done demanding dietary resets during software go-lives at my company (notorious for all the free sugary, fattening sweets they offer at onsite support centers). “Oh, I’m supposed to have a skinny-fat dad-bod now?” I started working with a personal trainer 4 days after my son was born.

I doubt my method for getting me to do things is healthy or well-adjusted. But I’ve learned to work within the framework. So as my wife’s pregnancy was winding down, the idea that she would need to put her career on hold or that either of us would need to quit our jobs sounded like a challenge. “Maybe other people have had troubles with it,” I thought. “But Rae and I can do this if we plan it out.” We can raise our son, get into the best shape of our lives, and continue to grow our careers all at once.

So technically, we’re doing all of those things. By Memorial Day this year, I was in the best overall shape I’ve been in since I was 19 years old. My wife completed coaching certification, got back to work, got back into the gym, and we’re both back to full-time work and full-time child-rearing. But it doesn’t feel quite like we’re accomplishing anything.

I had this grand ol plan that I’d start developing a fiction novel outline over the course of the 12 months between my 33rd and 34th birthday. 3 months into it, and I’m essentially still on step one. Even this blog was intended to be a weekly exercise…or bi-weekly at least. I told myself I wouldn’t take on too much new work at my job, yet I am in a new leadership position on my team, and I’m implementing a new (to me) software application. Why, Tylor? Why?

Rae is right in the thick of it too. She went from comfortably not traveling and wrapping up work at 4 pm each day to getting thrown on back-to-back traveling trips and late nights and weekends in the office fixing other people’s mistakes. And my patience about it has worn thinner and thinner, to the point I get irrationally upset on her behalf. While she is powering through, I want to yell at the people keeping her at the office or on the road. I see my wife nearly every night and yet I miss her all the time. My friends, we are learning our limits.

We listened to a podcast recently from a couple who are going through basically the same things we are. The podcaster (?) Rachel summed it up nicely: you have to say no. Oddly enough we listened to this podcast a day before we took our young boy to his first Major League Baseball game, only for him to get overstimulated and scream like we’ve never heard before. He then had belly issues, wouldn’t eat, and before you know it we’ve missed 7 innings and our family wonders if they’ve lost us for good. Too much. We’re trying to do too much! But we didn’t want to say no to our family. We want to be superhuman.

My wife is thoughtful and always wants to give everyone her best self. She doesn’t want to let people down, and rarely (if ever) does. I’m much more self-centered than my wife. Saying no to others isn’t too hard for me. I did it to drugs and alcohol (thanks D.A.R.E and addict father), I’ve said goodbye to Facebook months ago… Basically, I can turn away from things. But the uncomfortable area to navigate is our careers. How do I say no to a demanding job that I usually enjoy and get paid pretty well to perform? That’s been the hardest part, and has required the most creativity.

I’ve managed to get involved with projects that don’t require a ton of travel, and have been able to find creative solutions for the ones that do. I also have accepted that while my target job performance is here (I have my right hand pretty high), what I am able to practically give is about here (left hand is slightly lower than my right, but still impressively high in the air). I have to fit 55 hours of work into 45, rather than fit 70 into 55. I’ll probably get a “he’s doing well, but this could’ve been better,” type feedback from some of my peers, but I have to accept it. As the evil corporate couple HHH and Stephanie McMahon would tell Daniel Bryan, I should be proud to be a B+ player right now. Solid B+.

So the next few weeks will involve really breaking down necessity vs. desire. We like juggling a thousand things at once, but we’re going to work it down to a manageable 100 things. There’s so many good things coming our way this year (more family travel, fun home improvements, go-lives, and getting the dad bod I want), but if you see us around town, don’t bother asking us what else we’ve been up to. Just tell us about your lives. We need a break from ours.

She stares vacantly as I repeat her name. “Rae. Rae. RAE, she’s asking if you need anything else!” That one caught her attention, and my impatient disciplinary tone caught the restaurant’s attention. I feel stupid. “I swear I love my wife and we’re equals,” I mutter loud enough for some patrons to hear me. I have the same desperate frustration in my tone that I heard from my father so often growing up. It still catches me off guard.

I hear him in my own voice more often over the past five months. My patience has shriveled, my fuse has shortened. In the 5 months since becoming a parent, I’ve learned more about the psyche of my father than I had in the previous 30 years of knowing him. I’m not free from maternal influence. I become my mother when I panic about my son being too close to the edge of a bed, even if he’s in the dead center of a queen sized mattress. Every time he sniffles I think it’s pneumonia. I am on high alert and am convinced that everything bad that could happen is happening, and happening right now.

Not that I could, or would ever want to experience it, but I still struggle seeing how I would’ve handled parenthood ten or even, five years ago. I still barely feel like I know what I am doing and I am light years ahead of where I was in my mid-twenties…(okay I was in my late twenties five years ago. Piss off.) My wife isn’t immune to it either. Remember that catatonic hot mama in paragraph one? She’s adjusting as well. Exhaustion hits her and hits her hard. I can’t remember the last time I saw her get a full night’s sleep. She has definitely sacrificed more of herself since our son arrived. She is now back to work full-time and a full-time mother. She is still waking up more often than I am at night, even if it’s to pump. She’s gracefully transitioning from pregnant woman to post-partum working mother, while recovering physically and professionally.

We’re five months into it now, folks. And now, we’re becoming the stereotypes we fought so hard against. Two full-time employed working parents, forgetting to change cat litter for a week and falling asleep at 8:00 pm. Zombie-like moans and grunting exchanges in the bathroom to brush our teeth at 5 am. We take care of each other just enough to get to tomorrow, but we are forgetting what a moment alone together feels like. Friends who’ve already gone through parenting look at us and smile because they recognize all the familiar symptoms. Their favorite part of seeing us like this is knowing that it will pass soon enough, and these motions are all part of the process.

With parenthood on the horizon, I wanted to establish a healthier relationship with the planet. My childhood was full of dinosaurs, ZooBooks, field trips through Utah’s mountains, camping, and owning dozens of pets. We owned everything from monitor lizards to cats to scorpions to hermit crabs. As children, we were terrible pet owners, killing more creatures than Ted Nugent on coke. Aside from that, I’ve always had a deep connection to animals, nature, and living within the world instead of above it. My wife found it hard to believe I liked the outdoors, considering that since we met I had basically done nothing physical or spent any time outdoors for the first five years of our relationship. (I’ve gotten my shit together more recently…more on that in a later post). Even if I was indoors though, I was reading about nature, paleontology, and cultural issues with humans and nature.

Over the years I’ve been better able to process how much of an impact I’m leaving on this little hunk of rock hurling through space. Expecting a little one made me want to play a more active role in reducing my carbon footprint than I had over the past 30 something years. If you’re anything like me, at a certain point doing things for yourself isn’t enough motivation. My motivation had to start externally before I could bring it in house. For me, that was my son.

My mission was clear: I want to teach my son how to be a good citizen of the planet by setting the right example. I know I’m not alone when I say that I make so many excuses to justify the way I live. Even with the best intentions, my excuses for not exercising, or drinking to excess, or stressing out about things began to be the standard of living I set for myself. It’s part of my upbringing to justify bad habits, and I want that trait to die with me.

I won’t bore you with all the things I thought about before changing. Instead I’ll bore you with the specific things I changed. The first big change I made surprised me. I stopped eating red meat cold turkey–err cold cow. For the past few years I’ve stuck to a mostly paleo-centric diet. In loose terms, that means mainly unprocessed foods, sticking to real ingredients. I mostly leave out dairy, sugar, and grains as much as I can. Unless I’m doing a reset with a Whole30 program or something, I don’t really obsess about keeping it up 24/7. But for years I’ve been saying that I’d be a vegetarian if I wasn’t so used to eating meat. I mean, meat tastes delicious. I won’t deny that. Even now, if it flies or swims, I’ll eat it. But when it comes to pork, beef, and other red meat, I simply didn’t want to eat it anymore.

Reasons not to be a carnivore: some logical, some emotional. First, it’s never been lost on me that I am eating another living thing. To lack any kind of empathy about the things you choose to kill and consume is to be too far detached from the earth. As ass-backwards as it may seem to me, I think many hunters feel that same way. I’ve never felt that the natural world should be humans, then everything else. We’re the most technologically advanced animal to inhabit earth, but we’re still animals. I’m still divided on whether we’re better classified as apex predators or the worst invasive species on earth, but I digress.

Secondly, and this is probably more emotional, (though I am sure there’s some evidence to support it), cows and pigs are not mindless creatures just waiting to be slaughtered. They aren’t pink slime or the fatty strips sizzlin’ on a griddle. They are intelligent, social creatures. Though I have no intent of owning them as pets, over time I’ve started to lump them into the same category as cats, dogs, or horses. Most folks in our society would never consider eating category A, yet we justify eating category B. I just couldn’t make that justification anymore. Deep Shallow down, I think one day I’ll stop eating chicken, turkey, and some fish as well.

Finally, the single biggest catalyst to dropping red meat is that eating so much meat is just not sustainable for the environment. I’m not going to shove statistics down your throat, because I don’t want to spend the time googling them and let’s face it…facts mean nothing anymore, right? They just get in the way of the argument you’re trying to make. But here’s the conclusions I came to: cows generate a ton of methane (via toots and poops) and it takes a ton of water consumption to produce beef. Because it’s such a huge market, many farmers focus on growing corn and soybeans as their cash crops because it feeds cattle, pigs, chickens, and so on. Almost none of that corn and soy go to feeding humans directly. Add in runoff from animal waste and it really wasn’t terribly difficult for me to reduce meat consumption. When I do eat meat I try to eat things that didn’t have to travel half-way across the world to get here.

Before you get offended or defensive about anything, relax. I don’t care if you eat meat. You make your own decisions and you raise your own children. Also, I don’t think farmers raising all this meat and cash crops are unjustified in their business. They grow and harvest the things that people will buy. Farmers aren’t these idyllic representations of pure Americana. They are people who need to provide for their families and keep a roof over their head. But until we as consumers give them the profitable opportunity to grow more diverse and sustainable crops, what else are they supposed to do?

So I cut out some meat and never looked back. It’s been surprisingly easy to do. I prioritize vegetables more now than I ever have. I feel that I am exercising my influential power as a consumer. It’s not foolproof. It’s not as obnoxious as demonizing factory farming or as militant as joining PETA, but it’s one way I can do my part to change the world around me. And most importantly, I think it’s a way to raise my son to appreciate and respect the world he lives in. By the end of this year my wife and I will have our own garden and start growing our own food. It’ll save money I assume, but also save the resources needed to ship vegetables across the state or country, and get me one step closer to living in harmony with our blue dot.

As I mentioned, I still eat chicken and turkey. And I really have grown to love seafood. They all meet the same criteria I listed above for reasons to quit red meat. They are living creatures with a sense of pain and suffering. Birds eat cornmeal and soy. Aquaculture has it’s challenges. Admittedly, some days it feels like there’s no way to be a socially responsible meat-eater, but my goal is not to be perfect. My goal is to be a bit better every day.

Room for cream: The second change I made was carrying reusable cups everywhere for my coffee and water. I travel a lot. I drink a lot of coffee. As I shuffled through a single-serve world of airports and hotel lobbies, I really started noticing how much we all consume. Next time you’re in Starbucks, think of everyone in there at that moment, and then everyone that will be in there that day. Then think of how many misspelled names are written on paper and plastic cups, topped with plastic lids and sheathed in paper sleeves. Now multiple that by thousands of Starbucks around the country. Expand that to the other local and infinitely cooler coffee shops that aren’t Starbucks, but still generate the same volume of trash. Think of the many millions of disposable cups used that day. Add in the water bottles. Try to mentally process the volume of trash we created for a cup of delicious damn coffee. I tried, and it just struck me as absurd. It’s so much garbage it’s overwhelming.

I drink coffee every day. I love everything about coffee. I respond emotionally knowingf I’m drinking responsibly sourced single origin coffee from a northern Nicaragua cooperative. I drink that shit up. I spend 20 minutes brewing two cups of coffee in my Chemex because I think it tastes better (it does taste better, objectively). From the ritual of starting my day with coffee, to dealing with the unfortunate yellowing teeth stains I suffer for my habits, I love it. Cold brew, nitro, bulletproof, I love it. Just no fucking sugar and no fucking cream.

I had to accept that I was generating too much garbage. And just because I can recycle the cups, that doesn’t make it okay to just go through them. Just this morning I listened to an NPR story that discusses how we think we’re doing such a good thing by recycling that we actually generate more garbage because we feel like we’ve earned a trash credit by recycling. Recycle 12 coffee cups and get the 13th cup to throw into a landfill!

So I bought a reusable water bottle, a cold brew cup, and a normal coffee canteen. I tried measuring how many cups of coffee and bottles of water I saved by using my own cups. I gave up tracking it after a while, but it’s been significant. Two or three cups of coffee and three bottles worth of water a day add up to a bunch of plastic. I’ve had to break my own rule a time or two, but it’s so infrequent that when it does happen I actually feel guilty and it just propels me to be more strict moving forward. I’ve noticed that I also pay way more attention to the amount of sparkling water cans and beer bottles our household consumes too. Yes, we recycle all of it, but if we use less than hopefully there will be less on the planet overall.

These are just a couple changes I’ve made mostly due to my son coming into this world and me not wanting to be a hypocrite to him. While I’d like everyone to consume less, I don’t really care what you do. The biggest lesson I’ve learned over the past 6 months is that no one can make me the person I want to be other than me. At my age, no one is going to change my behavior but me. But I can still dictate the hell out of my son’s life for the next few years. That’s why we have kids, right?